


No True Scots Quair

by chr1711



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:47:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24425257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chr1711/pseuds/chr1711
Summary: Adventures across Time, Space, and Sheep with James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who did indeed once witness a Brocken Spectre.
Kudos: 1





	1. Riding the Blood Highway with James Hogg

It was a curious thing, Dave thought as the lift rattled down its course; hadn't we thought zombies would be bitey-bitey, running after you moaning about BRAINS? Instead it's the drug bores and the do-gooders that have come back to life and they are if anything worse. Only the previous day he'd had his arm seized by a lank-haired zom outside the Rutland on Hammersmith Reach, who proceeded to go on in excruciating detail about the drugs he'd taken and how drugs ought to be legalised and how cannabis was a naturally occurring substance and it was only the Man who decided it was illegal. All this took about fifteen minutes of droning about Amsterdam and some lame-arse conspiracy involving police spies and tents and vegetarian llamas or something shit like that. The zom lurched – or so he imagined – arm-waving after him with a demand for cash.  
Money, he thought. It was always about fucking money. Money is a sign of poverty or else why is it rationed? It was Karl Marx said that, and not that matrimaniac Robert Tressell. Guy has a shit marriage that was probably abusive (of him) and still calls single people 'unnatural'? I mean, WTF?  
Grab the groin and twist, says the giant when Dave strolls out of the flat-block lobby. That's the way to deal with the zom. Males anyhow, females I am not sure of.  
The giant is a reassuringly huge presence as they wander along Lillie Road with the orange-black-red-purple of a Hammersmith sunset ahead of them. They meet a wild-eyed Scotsman and the giant falls into gentle conversation with him and after a while the Scot walks with them.  
As they pass Normand Park a couple of zoms lurch towards them; or they aren't zoms, they're still-living junkies. Less trouble, much less. Bicyclists whir past. A robin sings brashly in the dark skeletal trees. The junkies fade back into the shadows at the sight of the travellers.  
Lillie Road and then up Fulham Palace Road. Someone has killed a pair of zoms and they lie slumped against a door. The legend I MARK is still visible.  
Cobblers, says Dave.  
That bad, asks Hogg.  
No, says Dave. Cobblers. Shoemakers. That was the shop of I. Mark. Now long gone. I have seen things you can't imagine. Japanese girls the worse for red wine on the toilet floor of the Distillers. Irish women sunbathing naked where the school playing fields used to be. Cadby Hall imploding in grey dust and the smoky candle ends of time. All those moments will be lost in time, in the Long Summer of Hammersmith; like beers in rain.  
What are you called, says Hogg. He is wearing an Esalen T-shirt.  
Dave, says Dave. Dave Pilgrim. Did you enjoy California?  
Very much, says Hogg. Of course now being in England, that's a shitter.  
Well you can catch a fucking tube to the airport just up there mate, says Dave, pointing towards the Broadway.  
Aye, says Hogg, chuckling. Only dinna point because it makes you look like a cunt.

The Hammersmith Apollo is a vast hangar of a place, once the Curzon Cinema and then the Hammersmith Odeon but what ever you call it there is rarely any sleep until you get there. There is a desultory queue of moshers and goths and punks outside. The Alpha Rats are on tonight. The Alpha Rats! Finest band this side of the Crab Nebula and a few well-wishers have woken up with the crabs the morning after a gig as well.

My grandmother, Dave says. My grandmother was a lady of the travelling people and her name was Mary Beth Lee. She set up camp upon Wimbledon Common with her people and there were fires burning in the night. I do not know why she married out but in my childhood I was taken up to the Common and I spoke with fierce men and women and those fires still burned. They still do.  
ALWAYS LOVE, as the dear John Sartis used to say. And he lived that. I try to.  
You have not spoken much of your family, says Hogg.  
My grandmother was the only interesting one, says Dave. Possibly. But possibly it is orientalism speaking here, the assumption that the foreign and the unknown is more interesting. At least you Scots continue your traditions, unlike us.  
Aye, says Hogg. It is a dark night in Hammersmith and the gig is hours over. Dave and Hogg have taxied it back to Dave's flat where Hogg is to sleep in the living room. The Judge is somewhere. He knows someone. He always knows someone.  
They sit and drink whisky and talk long into the night until Dave says,  
I think I must sleep now. You know where everything is?  
Trust me, says Hogg.  
In the night there is screaming, somewhere outside. Someone drunk and angry, or being attacked? Dave shifts in his bed unhappily. To call the police or not? But the screams end abruptly. These are bad times. Perhaps all times are bad. Dave as Dave or otherwise has long since felt that his life is a Western. Surrounded and imbued by fear, able to trust nobody, the constant sudden possibility of lethal violence.

The television is on and tuned to a dead crap channel. Hogg sits and watches in the night, the sound turned off but the subtitles on.  
The one with the thousand and seven murders  
or some episode like that. For a while Dave was obsessed with the "Smelly Cat" song that Phoebe sings in "Friends" as well as bringing on board its almost-certain ancestor, Tangela Tricoli's "Stinky Poodle."

For all its faults Hammersmith has a reasonably low murder rate. 48 murders over the first 12 years of the 21st century place Hammersmith & Fulham 20Th out of 33 London local authorities – most of those below it on the list are leafy outer suburbs – and minuscule compared with those cities and countries where being murdered is really not that unusual. Hammersmith being what it is and Dave being what he is he of course takes especial care after dark; when turning corners in the street; if people are walking towards him; when going for a run (for Dave's main form of exercise is running. His sports have always got simpler until there is just him and the open road). For a long time Dave never went out after dark, expecting immediate bloody death if he so much as tried. Even now any look, any motion towards him is responded to with fear and of course people pick up on this fear and reinforce it for him. Then it changed and things were different, travelling the Multiverse with the big guy (not Hogg, who is broader than he but no taller; no, the other guy) who is not, he is pretty sure, entirely human but so what? Then there were the killings and the scalpings and the evening redness in the west. If you wanted the equivalent of some kind of new age self reinvention only with violence instead of whatever macrame-knitting yoghurt-eating shit they go in for.

The zombies that confront them in shopping malls and pubs and down by the river by the Dove and the Black Lion and the Rutland and the Blue Anchor and the Blue Boat and the Old City Arms and the Crabtree are distinguished by their intense look of something to impart and the overwhelming terror which they instil in the hearer. He suspects that the giant first of all thought Hogg was a zom but politely ascertained that he was not.  
Dave wonders if some drug has got into the system or if the poisoned air of Hammersmith has finally taken its toll. Zoms are likely to sit in your flat with several tins of beer, smelling badly – they all smell horrible – and go on and on for hours. Can they not be silent? It would seem not. Silence is an aspect of the living. The dead cannot zip it.

In the morning Hogg is awake before Dave and paces the living room watching the sun come up over central London. He makes tea. When Dave finally emerges Hogg pours a mug of tea for him and Dave is gratified that the Scotsman does not attempt to add sugar.  
They go and have breakfast in George's, a cafe tucked into a backstreet behind Olympia like a note tucked into a back pocket and forgotten during all the time of travelling by train to and fro across the country, London to Birmingham and back and back again and around the coastal ports of the south.

A hundred years ago the building that is now George's Cafe was the meeting place of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a merry bunch of seekers after hidden truth which included WB Yeats and Aleister Crowley. These two fell out to the extent of Crowley turning up on the doorstep in full regalia and Yeats – or more to the point Yeats' pugilistic friend Hunter – denying him entry. That was in 1900 and since then it has been a cafe, with a candle shop and a bike shop for neighbours. 

After breakfast Hogg is gone. The silence surges slowly backward.


	2. All We Like Sheep

James Hogg the Ettrick shepherd has been camping in the hills for seventeen days now, his only companions the sheep. He has not washed. Occasionally if a sheep wanders lonely as a cloud near enough he will seize it and rub his arse against it to clean himself.  
He is working on a sequel to his A Queer Book. Tentatively titled Junk it is full of hangings, defecation, centipedes and rats and scorpions oh my. But mostly sheep. The Ettrick Shepherd is fond of his sheep and like a curious pipe-smoking typographer yet unborn to be found behind his hound, if the kennel's rocking don't bother knocking, he is less (eric) ghillie (despite his cure of the woolly tribe) than a Gil-Martin, to use the name of the demonic deuteragonist of his novel Confessions of a Justified Sinner. De'ilish indeed as his old mucker and mentor Walter Scott would no doubt put it. Although to those who say snickeringly 'the shepherd knows his sheep. That's in the Bible,' meaning, he knows his sheep in the Biblical sense, he fixes them with a canny look and says,  
I expect you'd know all about that.

His name cannot, after all, be blackened much forther. This James Hogg was once lionised by the Edinburgh literary establishment but later ostracised by the very same and laughed out of town. Hogg sits on his truck and farts sonorously in his squelching breeches.   
Fuck em if they can't take a joke, says Hogg. The very reason for his ostracism was precisely that, his tendency to tell people that religion was all bunkum and that you could basically do as you please. Like a stopped clock he is right occasionally; and conversely being a political firebrand does not make it impossible that one is also maintaining a tenuous grip on sanity and in a far from family-friendly way.  
He is fond of the old Hieland traditions such as minding your own business. But that kind of thing doesn't go down well in the Edinburgh set so he has upped sticks to somewhere obscure and dreich only not too far from a distillery.  
The truck is one he has built with his own hands, a low four-wheeled thingie with a handle, ideal for pulling his own belongings along the road behind him. It is a precursor of the wheeled suitcase which is such a peril at airports and has put baggage porters out of business because every fat tourist can drag their own bizarrely coloured pull case into people's ankles while fatting about the airport being fat.

Hogg has two daughters, Catherine and Isabella, and a son, also named James and now working in the publishing field. James fils (whom we shall call James and his father by his surname, Hogg) is working on a book called Every Cunt is Patronising to Me about exactly that subject: his lifelong experience of having people over-explain things to him or assume his ignorance. It follows his hundred-selling Ah'm Nae Let Oot the Hoose, a children's book that was turned down by every school in Britain for its depiction of a 'carceral' childhood. Had he been writing 150 years later it would have been called Misery Lit. The illustrations were drawn by his sister Catherine, a talented penwoman and colourist. After it was published – by the house James works for – the level of patronising over-explanation as to Why It Was A Bad Idea was astonishing and sparked the new project. His father when asked if James' book was drawn from life was unavailable for comment in more detail than,  
Fuck oaf. 

But back we must go to Hogg who is currently dragging his truck with his favourite among the sheep Dolly on it down the hillside track to his wee hoose at the foot of the fell.  
The wheels o' the truck gang roond an roond, he sings as the delighted Dolly baas nervously. Nervous but delighted – the world of a sheep on a Scottish hillside. 

And a very nice hillside it was. And when he stepped inside his dear wee huttage who should he see sitting on the table (without benefit of clearing it first from its debris of plates cups saucers stale food flies etc) but Hamish Bunratty, the Bunratty of Glencoe and Avilion, wielder of the Mighty Stapler of Doom in an incident we shall not yet speak of.  
What the fuck are you doing here, said Hogg.   
How's the sheep, said Bunratty. As fragrant as ever?   
I said, said Hogg, what the fuck are you doing here. Chasing people with staplers is it.  
What happened to your punctuation? Said Bunratty.  
Niver mind my punctuation, said Hogg. Will ye leave this instant.  
I will not, said Bunratty. Something long and white crawled out of his arm and he inspected it, pulled it out to its full length, and threw it into a corner.  
Bugs, he said. The entire fookin world is about bugs. We're just dinner. Fer bugs.  
Hogg farted in agreement.   
What is it ye want, said Hogg. And I willnae grace ye with a question mark because ye do nae deserve one.  
I wondered, said Bunratty, if you could spare thirty pound for a poor feller.  
Hogg spluttered. Dolly the sheep looked up. The air was getting rank. Somewhere the life expectancy of a small south asian country tanked overnight and the stock markets went up.  
If I had thirty quid, said Hogg, if I had thirty quid I would not give it to you.  
Lend, said Bunratty.  
Lending, said Hogg, means you give it back. What have you ever given me back including my pipes -   
I told ye, said Bunratty. Lost in a lock-up in Edinburgh. It wasna my fault -  
Aye, says Hogg, and the dug ate yer hamewerk. What of my several hundred quid I have already 'lent' you -  
I said I'd give it back, said Bunratty.  
Well you have nae, said Hogg. As my old mither said, niver a borrower nor a lender be.  
Stout advice, said Bunratty.  
Aye, said Hogg, which is why ye will nae follow it and nor like a fond fool do I. But still, no money for I have none.  
So even without a stapler Bunratty lunges for Hogg, no arms outstretched which can be easily sidestepped but one thrust forward, a low blow that knocks Hogg backwards against alarmed Dolly, over the sheep and far away while Bunratty seizes a staff from the table and prepares to lay into the luckless Ettrick shepherd. A blow or two falls.  
But Dolly, stout Dolly, seeing her master attacked and herself ignored, reaches upward doughtily and bites the serge-clad lump she sees above her.  
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH goes Bunratty.   
The dogs in the next bothy down the valley set to howling and squalling and making a fuss fit to wake the dead or very least the postman, who doubles as watchman, a stout elder called Angus McBothy who in his younger years was a Hieland guardsman and thus is to be reckoned with even now. Dolly's teeth are still in position because, dear sheep as she is and a herbivore, she is trying to figure out what happens next. Is this foreplay? She wonders. Bunratty is beating at her with his fists and Hogg is doubled up with laughter and flatulence.   
Leave my sheep alone, says Hogg finally.  
McBothy stouts up the path some time later to find Bunratty doubled up in a corner and helping himself – when he can uncoil himself – to Hogg's scotch, Hogg still occasionally giggling, and Dolly cropping the thin grass outside as if nothing had happened. She is after all a sheep. She looks up at McBothy as he reaches the hut and she baas softly as if to say,  
I wouldn't go in there if I were you.  
Ah, but I must, says the watchman, and he does.  
How are ye, friend James? Says McBothy. May I be of assistance?  
It is friend Angus, says Hogg. There was an altercation and my young sheep Dolly bit him. I suspect he will not need much in the way of medical attention however he is necking my whisky which I do not begrudge him. Are sheep not valiant and friends to us all?  
Isaiah 53, verse six, says Angus McBothy. All we like sheep. Save for friend Bunratty there who may be weeing like a sheep for a while yet.

After all the pud-pulling and the sheep-grabbing – the Ettrick Shepherd does indeed have a sheep for a pet but there is nothing more than good old fashioned affection going on here, kind of thing the Scottish Man-Sheep Love Association (SMASHLA) might look kindly on, and he upon them were it not bruited that far from being on the side of those sheep who safely graze the heels and hinds of their owners, there are those who do an Eric Gill on the sheep instead. BAAAAA!


	3. Ears Dry on their Own

The last traces of sunlight spatter incarnadine light from the far sierras and the arroyos like the flicker of fire from the hopeful match of a lonely smoker.  
The two travellers have roosted up for the night. There is no fire. There is greater fear of the Apache and the Ombaga than of bears. The great rout has taken them all by surprise and the silver metal of rails will shine also in the righteous morning. A man with a holing instrument, making holes in the ground.  
The Judge watches. He never sleeps. He does however warsh unlike some of the men in that now-lost gang who shat from the saddle and grabbed passing dogs upon which to wipe their arses. The Judge's eyes are the questing yellow-green of the scops owls whose low whistling 'doob' echoes from among the sagebrush and oil palm and the red rocks in whose cold embrace ancient blades and pieces of armour forged by long-dead smiths in another continent rust silently to the very same colour of the rocks themselves. The owls begin in quick echo and soon fall out of sequence. Dave listens. Eventually the faster owl catches up with the slower; after what, ten iterations. He has spent several evenings trying to determine the moment when the crickets stop chirping in the pinones. Now he realises they do not stop at once but vague out gradually, until the last embarrassed or doughty individuals finally stop chirping and turn in for the night as the sky turns indigo and crimson and tangerine over the distant imagined ocean.  
What is on your mind, he says kindly.  
When I was assaulted, said Dave I had no desire to revenge myself upon my assailants any more than I had done so before. I had long, long realised that people will hurt you as much as they are able to do so. There was no betrayal of trust whatsoever. I had no trust. People are assholes.

If there are human thoughts in the Judge's mind they must surely turn to the low bodegas and the taverns and the necklaces of severed ears dried in the sun and the men strung up in the wind and the women ripped apart and the babies crucified upon the burning tree outside San Juan de Alameda and the scalps torn away and bundled up only to be abandoned by the roadside months later in their stinking impiety for there is no further market for such things in this new cleaned up South west where if good men go mad what becomes of such as the gang, those who have survived the bullet and the knife and the savage infatuation of dog and bear and the creatures that lurk beneath the ridges of the ancient Ombaga burial caves, animals part lion and part bear, their vicious long tusks gleaming in the dusk as they descend to rend and tear? His hands move in muscle memory: a practised motion he digs in the Bowie knife, competently tears out first one eye and then the other, discards the gobbets of now unpurposed flesh to the raw earth beneath his heels.  
Am I not right, says the Judge, remembering.  
But Dave has fallen asleep waiting for the Judge to finish.  
Fucking sesquipedalian cunt, Dave murmurs as the beneficent indigo of night covers his eyes. I'll exit your light some day.  
I think you will not, says the Judge softly, and strokes his forehead. I think you will not.  
The Judge watches Dave sleep.  
Que mas lindo durmiendo. Porque te has parado.

Above the red blaze of the last light the stars are holes in an old, threadbare blanket. A wind rattles the sagebrush. Then the world is still, so still there seems no place for evil and yet in the minds of the sleeping men it is there, baleful, ever present.

From time to time Hogg has seen the Aurora in the Northern Sky, high dancing green and yellow light in a cold crystal-black, a sight that only appears on the stillest and clearest of nights. The faithful sheep Dolly is beside him as he sleeps – she is on top of the covers, he draws the line at letting her under them. She generally starts the night lying by the fire and at some time in the night when she gets cold she comes and paws him to let her onto the bed.   
Red night blazes through the windows. He gets up. A fire? He thinks. Some tinker burning heather, someone got drunk and knocked over a candle, whoosh, the whole hut goes up? No. The redness is in the sky itself and still, very still, as still as the Aurora but this is something yet different.  
In the morning the hills are different. The same, or similar, but different. In the night he woke briefly to the familiar sound of rain; yet the intensity of it was such that it became unfamiliar again, like a lover insisting, pushing, taking up that small space in his life that was his own. Now the sky is a pale blue, a Scots blue he thinks, sweet and clear; but the green unremembered hills are not his hills, not the mounds he has traversed with his sheep these several years now. He has a feeling of grey dustiness beyond them, of red rock without shadow under this red rock, that the pines and brush limit this bowl of early daylight and beyond them; well, what?

Unfamiliar places, thinks James Ettrick Hogg. On the ground near this red rock a teeming of ants goes about its business. It has found a dead shrew and is dismantling it. Thoughts of the Queen Ant Mother of the Crab Nebula swirl through his head. She will be pleased. He recalls Bunratty's comment that we are all just a life support system for bugs in the end. The rock is cold and damp. He is in a valley. A small arroyo slopes up towards a crest of rock and dark green vegetation. He heads towards it not imagining at all what he will see when he gets there.  
As he reaches the crest he sees, momentarily, a distant blue ocean, sparkling in the sunlight, and ochre and brown tumbling rocks stilled in their million-year flight. Then two figures loom up from the brush in front of him.  
The smaller is nondescript, a wiry man tanned and wearing patched clothing. Poacher or tinker or something like that, Hogg thinks.  
But the other who now looms up from a brush-lined hollow draws his eye at once. Huge and white-skinned, his face shaded by a wide hat. He must be seven feet tall at least, Hogg thinks; and the huge hands spread wide makes him an even more imposing sight. Given his rough brown clothing he looks more like a bear than a man although he is beardless and does not even seem to have eyebrows.  
Hogg raises his hands. No weapons. It seems appropriate.  
The giant smiles a cynical-looking smile.  
Well met, fellow, he says.   
I am James Ettrick Hogg, he says. I –  
the giant raises a hand.  
The author of "A Queer Book" and "The Queen's Wake"? Says the giant. He nods. I have read them, Mister Hogg. I thought them fine tales. And what brings you to this part of the world?  
If I knew what part that was, Hogg says, I might be able to answer.  
California, says the giant. At least, I believe so. The worlds have unstabilised themselves, did you not see the red light in the sky? You will I think be familiar with the concept that similar places are at some times coterminous, that Chicago is covalent with Birmingham, England, and that the walker on Main Street, Bumfuck, Idaho could turn a corner and be in a small rancid town in upland Turkey, and so on?  
I am indeed, says Hogg. I believed I had invented that concept for myself. Interesting to find it out here, because I do not think I had used it in my writing as yet.  
Well then, says the giant. Allow me to introduce myself. I am the Judge and this my friend is known as Dave. Where is your other boot? The judge says, noting that Dave is now wearing only one.   
The heel is broken, Dave says. I was fixing it.  
Aye, says the giant. And stop biting your nails, there's a good boy.

Dave walks alone back to his flat. The whole of history and geography surrounds him as he walks. He passes people he knows slightly, for he has lived here many years. He knows their families and their children and their ways. The big guy is out there somewhere. It is likely that he will be back and there will be adventure once more. For now silence is blessed.

2.

They came over the ridge like a shambling horde of zombies, a zerg rush of stink with a halo of flies. Nearly took us by surprise, they did, and the giant was up there stark bollock naked with a gun in either hand, taking his time, aim, fire. One or two of the men fell, shattered. A gaunt figure with a filthy face, insects buzzing around him, raised his hands. All three of them. The giant smiled. Three hands because in his left hand the filthy man held a pallid object, a human forearm streaked with something unnameable.   
Kamerad, he said with a sly grin. The others clustered behind and beside him, about a dozen of them. The dirty dozen, I figured. They certainly were.  
Who are you, said the giant. Question marks cost extra and I don't plan on giving you credit.   
We are the Wetcaps, slurred the man. He, like the others, was dressed in a motley of items from different uniforms. He wore a bloodstained tunic that had a sergeant's stripes on one shoulder. His cap was indeed wet, though with what I was not sure, but on it gleamed a badge. I could not make the badge out from that distance but it looked like a lion being sodomised by a fat public schoolboy. I am Tommy Fidler, sergeant, hell mouse.  
I see, said the giant. A long way from home, aren't you.  
Aren't we all, said the man. Hell mouse.  
What is hell mouse, said Hogg, wandering up from where he had been warshing. Say what you like about Hogg, he warshed every so often, and it looked like the Wetcaps didn't.  
Mice in hell, said Fidler. If man is not holy, war is just mice in a teapot.  
There is truth in that, said the giant. He was still stark bollock naked and loomed over the Wetcaps like a vast white thunderwhale. Seven feet tall and big with it, and a cock that would have put General Entrescu of blessed memory to shame. As it was the giant had personally crucified Entrescu 'for being a cunt' as he put it. He had however left the General's outsize genitalia intact out of respect for a valued enemy.  
Please, said the giant. Enter our camp. I apologise for the hasty shooting earlier. Would you and your men care to wash and shave? We have hot water.  
It was true that the fusillade the giant had let fly did not seem to have harmed the Wetcaps it struck. They had pulled themselves to their feet once more and stood swaying. Definitely zoms, I thought. Of some or whatever kind.  
We never warsh, said Fidler. Take it as we find it.   
Must play hell with the insects, said the giant.  
Ayuh, said Fidler. We're used to cooler climes where the terrible rain of shells and shit falls every day. Do you mind the Bosnian war which was unusual for being the only recent conflict not to take place in a far off country or a shithole or both.  
That is true, said the giant. People wonder why Pakistanis emigrate but quite honestly would you stay in a constantly flooded warzone.  
Where else is there, said Fidler with a grin, detaching a bug from his cheek.


	4. Hogg and the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdhui

James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd, trousers squelching, makes his way up the gully. Sheep flee in timorous flight, baaing through the heather. He holds reins in his hand and several yards behind him a young highland lad stumbles, naked but for a pair of stout shoes, wrists bound with a yard-long rope tied to the other end of the reins.  
Hogg can keep this up for days and often has. The boy has gone through exhaustion and out the other side several times, and already believes he has gone through the Gate of Deeper Slumber into a face-off with the Big Bubbly Guy himself, the one with the burning five-lobed eye.   
The path is rugged and steep and he knows it well. Since fleeing an Edinburgh unwilling to treat with his highland ways, fondness for not bathing (rather than a lack of fondness for bathing, it is a positive taste for dirt) and proclivities, he has retreated to his home hills where few know how or where to follow. He turns to look at the boy who has fallen to his knees and remarks the thin whip scars of mountain vegetation. These thin scars are nothing besides the welts that Hogg has himself inflicted upon the fair, smooth skin of the boy's back and sides and arse and thighs.  
Do keep up, boy, Hogg calls and pulls. The boy falls to his face. Hogg walks back down the few yards of path and remarks the boy's exposed arsehole. Crouching by the path, he rolls the boy over and takes a bottle of fine mountain whisky from his pocket. Unstoppering it, he pours it into the boy's mouth and slaps the boy's cheeks a few times.   
Now move, he says, pulling the boy to his feet and grabbing his naked and bruised arse. 

The fog descends, the mist from nowhere that bears within it tentacles of shadow. Within it a dark figure strides, leading another on a leash. Hogg makes faces at it and it makes shadow-faces right back. He relishes the terror this creature raises in him; without fear, he says, how would we know we live? The cold of fear is equally the cold of the ancient mist from the rocks.   
The boy looks up the hill and gibbers strange words. Hogg kisses him soundly.  
Tonight in the box, darling, he says.  
The boy has forgotten the English language and is away in far Carcosa where twin moons rise over a desolate horizon of broken inkblack towers. Hogg raises his shaggy arms streaked with ordure and filth, blinks his blackened eyes and screams.  
The creature on the rock screams back.  
Funny, Hogg says. It's never done that before. He looks down at the boy.  
Have you done something, he says and kicks the boy in the groin.  
The boy doubles up and retches, too far gone to vomit properly.

The golden target strikes, Hogg says, and having struck, pains on;   
nor all thy piety and wit  
shall take it back nor unbollock one inch of it.

It isn't his best poem. He is kneeling on the rock with the boy's bare arse in front of him. The boy is sprawled face-down. Hogg tries to remember when the boy was last permitted to wear clothes. Time, he believes, is negotiable, especially here and now, the great crouching ghosts of the Big Grey Man and the Big Grey Boy --  
Hogg wonders if that will be a thing. A mysterious shadowy man and his equally masked sidekick, descending upon the world.  
Hogg screams into the back of the boy's head, trying to make him scream equally. It is, Hogg considers with the rough sensibility of his Hieland ancestors, far better when they scream. He rolls the boy over again with a sigh and notes the reddened eyes and the bleeding mouth.   
Dear, dear, he says. He stands, unbuttons his fly and relieves himself into the boy's mouth. The boy shakes his head from side to side as if to get away from the stream of thick acidic urine that splashes into his mouth. Some of it goes in, Hogg is pleased to notice.  
Hey you, Hogg says. Lying naked on the rock, holding to your injured cock, can you hear me?  
The boy squirms and clutches his abused groin.

Once, Hogg says, I was kept in a cellar for a month. A Glasgow poet by the name of Robert McKellar kept me chained and fed on porridge. I still don't know why he did that. I suspect it was some kind of weird art project. 'Kellar' is German for 'cellar' of course but I think that's just coincidence.   
Then what happened, you ask, Hogg says, though the boy doesn't ask at all, being still preoccupied with making faces at himself in the mirror of the infinite or quaking before the red-robed priest of the temple of Nha-Gneeth, who is not even remotely human and whose face is never revealed (but we can imagine it involves tentacles, assuming it is even a face at all).   
Well, he let me go, eventually, says Hogg. Dropped me on a street corner near the Clyde. By the time I came to I'd been attacked by a couple of dockworkers on their way home but never mind. The morning sun was crimson as the blood.

The Big Grey man knuckles up, Hogg's own shadow no longer responsible for him. The sky above him - he rolls onto his back and smiles at the sky - is the perfect blue of the eyes of a boy he once met. The boy, meanwhile, is shaking with delirium. Hogg takes the bottle from his pocket yet again and pours more mountain whisky into the boy's mouth and then into his own.   
i don't know where I get it from, Hogg says. I don't mean the whisky, I know that. I mean the happy ability to keep on with you like this for days, but then again, why not? Where is it for you? Are you orbiting a dead star in the radio galaxies? Soul on fire out beyond the pinwheel of Orion, facing invaders in the tentacled Drift? Walking the Plateau of Leng and dodging the six-foot albino penguins beyond the Mountains of Madness? Care for some asshole candy?  
He hands the boy something indescribable. The boy, throat already gone with screaming, stares at him and says something like Wg'lai ng'lah mglw'nafh Cthulhu ai'y Rl'yeh fhtagn.  
He does indeed, says Hogg. And we await the day when the Big Bubbly Dreamer will awake.   
They begin the long walk back down Ben Macdhui, towards the treeline, and huge sulphurous penguins watch them as they descend. The boy stumbles and falls and pushes himself to his feet and goes on, on, among the heather and the ferns and the tiny cups of bluebells and the cold midday air and the midges and the pine cones and the chittering song of waxwings and crossbills and the caw of hoodies and the fluttering of busy chaffinches and the subtle crunch of stones beneath his feet.


End file.
